The storage of electronic data, and more generally, the management of electronic data, has become increasingly important. With the growth of the Internet, and of cloud computing in particular, the need for data storage capacity, and for methods of efficiently managing stored data, continue to increase. Many different types of storage devices and storage systems are currently used to store data, including disk drives, tape drives, optical disks, redundant arrays of independent disks (RAIDs), Fibre channel-based storage area networks (SANs), etc.
In many enterprise-level storage systems, it is useful to add data management services to the existing storage system in order to perform one or more desired tasks. For example, it may be useful in some storage systems to add functionality to copy data, to perform a snapshot of a data image, to back up data, to replicate data, to perform data migration from one storage device or system to another, etc. It is also often desirable to be able to verify that any copy made is a valid copy of the original data. Furthermore, it is often desirable to perform such services while causing little or no interruption to the storage system's operations.